Attracting Investment Capital to Nutrition Interventions: Promoting Sustainability, Managing Risk, and Leveraging Business Expertise
Christopher Walker *
Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, Geneva, Switzerland.
Dominic Schofield
Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, Geneva, Switzerland.
Craig Courtney
Independent Consultant, Geneva, Switzerland.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Objectives: Ensuring affordable and sustained access to quality nutritious foods at scale is critical for addressing malnutrition. With the scale-up of public health programs distributing specially formulated fortified products for treatment and prevention of malnutrition, there are opportunities to build the capacity of local companies to meet this growing demand and serve the nutritional needs of low-income households. But companies that make such foods often lack access to capital and the requisite nutrition expertise, which can prevent the scale-up of promising approaches to supplying such foods. Also, grant funding often lacks the flexibility and incentive structure required for commercial investment.
Methods: GAIN has successfully applied a model of blended capital investment that combines grant-making with investment capital. It created nutrition-themed investment funds with "best-in-class" financial institutions that offer various types of financing (e.g., debt, equity) and critical nutrition sector expertise to businesses that are producing more nutritious foods.
Results: GAIN's investments in food manufacturers in Kenya, Haiti, and Ecuador demonstrate the range of ways in which nutrition expertise can be combined with investors' capital and business expertise to introduce appropriate foods for infants and young children into diverse markets. By leveraging significant amounts of private capital, these investments increased the target population reached per dollar of grant money spent. They also generated insights into how to attract investment capital to nutrition.
Conclusions: These funds have created the ability to share risk, generated additional financing for nutrition by attracting investment capital, and promoted the sustained impact of nutrition interventions at the base of the pyramid.